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Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

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Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#71

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tyurok wrote: post #66

Generalist can be a specialization in itself. Imagine someone that can do a bit of front-end, backend, infra, design, would be a specialist in bootstrapping a startup. Don't get too attached to market/industry defined roles. Another way to raise rates is to take risks (like deadlines, promises) but every person had their own risk profile.

Or change the language. Instead of 'generalist', sell yourself as a senior developer, architect, lead developer, etc. Nobody asks "what programming language are you an architect in", because the job is supposed to be much broader than that.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#72

Post by leetrout »

tyurok wrote: post #66

Generalist can be a specialization in itself. Imagine someone that can do a bit of front-end, backend, infra, design, would be a specialist in bootstrapping a startup. Don't get too attached to market/industry defined roles. Another way to raise rates is to take risks (like deadlines, promises) but every person had their own risk profile.

Excluding design this is me and what I enjoy doing.

I named my operation "engine ignite" because I like helping startups start.

I LOVE getting folks leveled up on team process and procedure to support SOC2 and such.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#74

Post by klapaucjusz »

I charge $150/hr. for new work and do pretty much exclusively hourly-based work. I have many clients that I grandfather on lower rates.

The second half of this equation is how many billable hours you can get as freelancer in a week. Plenty of the things I do are not billable, and the more different small contracts I'm working on the less billable hours I'm able to fit in. I would say I average 20-25 hours billable on a regular work week of 40-ish hours.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#75

Post by kache_ »

prismatix wrote: post #60
kache_ wrote: post #22

time to quit my fang job l m a o

Keep in mind that contractors don't receive benefits (health care, dental, etc) and have to pay about 30% in taxes. So in reality, the pay is about equal once you factor in that.

I live in Canada & I've done the spreadsheet math. I can probably ~triple my salary if I go balls to the walls. Insurance is a drop in the bucket (I can just outright buy my drugs). I'm just kinda comfy where I'm at, and I'm having fun at my job.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#76

Post by ryanSrich »

scrollaway wrote: post #24
ryanSrich wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great rate. I’d love to know how you find clients willing to pay this amount. Most people I’ve come across that need a new site/app built have extremely low budgets. Like $10,000…total for an app. Certainly not $10,000 for a week.

Simply put: Talk to people who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency (OP's selling point of being a "single person" means not dealing with a whole team, back&forth comms, etc). Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps. I have a similar weekly rate but $200 hourly; How I bill depends on the client (though yes, gravitating more and more towards weekly…

This doesn’t answer my question. How do you find people “who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency”?

> “Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps.”

The specific case I was referring to was a series seed funded startup that needed to build an MVP. Even for them $10,000 was too much. They ended up finding someone for half that to build their entire V1. This was maybe 5 years ago. They’ve since rebuilt everything in house and are doing very well now.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#77

Post by osigurdson »

rtlfe wrote: post #48
joshmanders wrote: post #5

I specialize in the ability to competently and fully build from the ground up your whole business from design, development, system administration, deployments, testing, seo and other stuff as a single person. My rate is $10,000/week pre-paid monthly.

Have you tried asking for more? If you're actually good at everything you say, you could be making the same amount of cash plus benefits at a FANG, so I'd expect the contracting rate to be much higher.

OP didn’t say they were good at competitive programming.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#79

Post by wpietri »

rtlfe wrote: post #48
joshmanders wrote: post #5

I specialize in the ability to competently and fully build from the ground up your whole business from design, development, system administration, deployments, testing, seo and other stuff as a single person. My rate is $10,000/week pre-paid monthly.

Have you tried asking for more? If you're actually good at everything you say, you could be making the same amount of cash plus benefits at a FANG, so I'd expect the contracting rate to be much higher.

Why's that? Large companies generally don't need single generalists; what they mostly have is teams of specialists, people who can get much deeper into a subject than a generalist can. Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would thrive?

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#80

Post by madaxe_again »

bubblehack3r wrote: post #69
madaxe_again wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man. I (CISSP, CISA), 20 years of experience, everything from development to dev management to sales and marketing to finance to fundraising, the whole shebang, do ISO27001 ISMS’s and coach through certifications… for $70/hr. But then, my clients are based in the U.K., where technology is still generally seen as worthless.

Sounds like it is less technical correct? I find that there are a lot of auditing firms out there willing to do compliance work for cheap therefor bringing down the prices (still not super low). Technical auditing and training in cyber security was always a kind of niche that allows you to charge more.

No, I typically end up filling the roles of CTO, CISO - I can advise, implement, whatever, on virtually any stack.

It’s just that in the U.K., technology skills have little to no value.

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